Arena Profile: Former Rep. Artur Davis

Artur Davis is a former, four-term Member of the U.S. House of Representatives from Alabama. A “radical centrist” in today’s hyper-partisan environment, Davis has made a career of advocating for the ever-narrowing political middle. Davis has never been afraid to challenge the left or the right – whether challenging liberals on Occupy Wall Street and voter ID laws or conservatives on the influence of big money in politics.

Davis represented the Seventh District of Alabama as a Democrat from 2003 to 2010. He was viewed as a rising star in the House, assuming positions of influence including a seat on the Ways and Means Committee, recruitment chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee in the 2008 cycle and co-chairman of the New Democrat Coalition. In 2008, Esquire Magazine named him one of the 10 Best Congressmen in America.

In 2010, Davis was defeated in a shocking upset in the Democratic primary in his bid to become the first black elected governor in the Deep South.

Davis is now a columnist and commentator across a wide media spectrum. He’s a contributor to Politico's Arena, the National Review Online, the blog The Recovering Politician and has appeared as a guest analyst on MSNBC, CNBC and the Fox Business Network.

Davis, a 1990 magna cum laude graduate of Harvard University and a 1993 cum laude graduate of Harvard Law School, is a licensed attorney in Washington, D.C. He previously served as a federal prosecutor with a near 100 percent trial-conviction record and as a partner at the law firm SNR Denton LLP.

Former Rep. Artur Davis's Recent Discussions

Nancy Pelosi: Good for the Democratic Party?

The continued Pelosi reign is troublesome for anyone who genuinely wants to break gridlock: Pelosi represents a wing of the Democratic Party that can barely fathom why conservatism exists, that sees Republicans as not much more than evangelicals and Luddites, and that views the debate through the lens of safe seats where liberal blogs pose more of a political danger than Republicans.

Pelosi's wing of the party is the one that blithely squandered a majority in 2010, and it poses as much of a threat to a grand compromise as does any force on the right.

The Romney campaign's imperfections are familiar enough - an absence of Reaganesque bravado, an inability to enlarge the race into a broader critique of liberalism's shaky current state, and a reluctance to deploy Obamacare as a weapon. But if victory happens today, it should be credited to a timely pivot in October that just might be the best executed last month strategy shift in memory. The repositioning of Romney as a bipartisan problem solver undercut Barack Obama's core asset and singlehandedly dissolved the caricature that was driving Romney's negatives.

As for Obama, few campaigns have been as brutally effective in winning the daily spin wars or dealing blows to their rival. From summer to September, the hope and change artists put on a clinic in negative politics that came perilously close to disqualifying Romney; at a minimum, their work somehow preserved Obama's edge when the economy was slowing and when by all lights he should have fallen behind.

But the error that is likely to defeat Obama tonight is the odd, inexplicable choice to never frame his tenure as anything other than a cagematch against Republicans. Obama's own case since spring has been a rendition of the wars fought against Republicans and the ideological gulf between the parties. It has rallied partisans while turning off independents and reducing Obama to the space of being the most polarizing president since Nixon. I can't recall a president who has so thoroughly surrendered the political ground that once made him unbeatable.

It’s a conceit of journalists who must take a stand by a deadline that one speech in a campaign could ever be decisive, even one as prodigiously brilliant as Bill Clinton’s opus in Charlotte.

Add to that the fact that half the speech - maybe its most blistering half regarding Republicans - happened after 11 p.m. EST, as well as the variable that the man delivering it is not on the ballot and governed for his six best years in a manner strategically and philosophically distinct from the man he was defending. (I won’t even revisit my point on this site a few days ago that an admittedly powerful address shredded and disguised facts shamelessly).

Republicans would be wise, however, to recognize that Clinton’s central theme, “‘we’re all in this together’ is a far better philosophy than "you’re on your own," happens to be the single most compelling weapon that Democrats will wield this fall, far more effective than spinning Barack Obama’s record on job creation, and much more lethal than point by point engagement on who does what to Medicare. The argument is an all purpose indictment that suggests that a Romney-Ryan administration might not have much of a moral core - and that the default result would be policies that deregulated Wall Street at risk to the rest of us, threw the vulnerable off the safety net, or hoarded prosperity so tightly that it barely trickled down to the middle.

To be sure, the Obama iteration that society is a connecting web of responsibilities is too complex for its own good and comes close to reimagining individual success as not all it’s cracked up to be. The formulation is one Republicans have mastered rebutting, aided by Obama’s ill-advised articulation that “you didn’t build that.”

But Clinton's brand is something else in several respects: first, it offers that good communities should try to boost the prospects of their own without leaving mobility entirely up to individual effort. Second, it trades on the uncontroversial notion that societies can turn selfish unless checked by some sense of mutual obligation. While the Obama version flies in the face of our own experiences about what makes individuals flourish, the Clinton version avoids diminishing personal accomplishment while evoking our well worn sensibilities about human nature.

The world sketched by Obama makes government the single dominant instrument in civil society, and a steady majority of Americans would recoil at that prospect. The Clinton conception, though, arguably doesn’t so much grow government as it gives government a morality for measuring its deployment of resources.

It may be that no words will sway voters from concluding that Obama’s “incomplete” report card is just not good enough. But if the economy muddles along enough to create reasonable doubt, or even if Mitt Romney wins and has to survive Democratic obstruction, Republicans will need a case that is broader than a defense of economic liberty. The conservative future will have to include aspirations as well as guardrails, and cannot rely solely on rose-tinted lenses to assess human and corporate conduct.

Arguably, conservatism did not face this challenge in the last decade, when it was Democrats who were the party of cease and desist - as in end the war in Iraq, expire the Bush tax cuts, and don’t touch Social Security. Nor was Clinton’s vision much of an issue in 2010, when expanding government was the only real Democratic mantra. But Clinton just served up a reminder that stripping down government need not mean stripping it of core values. Conservatives need an answer.

Last night, Bill Clinton was the consummate trial lawyer that he would have become had his Arkansas comebacks not worked out: saddled with bad facts, he talked three times as long and tugged on twice as many heartstrings as he and his text had planned.

To use his riff, was he right? Infrequently, and the wrongs included some whoppers: like the Democratic meme that a grinch named Mitch McConnell stole Obama's prospects by pledging to block his reelection. The only problem: when McConnell said it, he had a meager 40 votes in the Senate, managed to stop a grand total of 0 Obama initiatives in the first half of this term, and cut a deal with Democrats that avoided a massive tax scheduled hike at the end of 2010 and by so doing, almost certainly saved Obama from a second recession in three years. And the jobs bill that the grinch supposedly blocked in 2011? Still waiting for an Obama loyalist, Harry Reid, to bring it to the floor in a Democratic Senate.

What about the notion that hard-hearted Republicans have it in mind to devastate Medicaid and to leave the old and poor in a tear-inducing state? Powerful, beautiful words - it just happens that it was the Obama administration that threatened to shut down state Medicaid programs if governors refused to accept the Affordable Care Act's new Medicaid regulations, until seven Supreme Court justices stopped them.

No one litigates bad facts better than Clinton - and it is a marvelous thing to watch him - but rarely has a major speech trashed so many undeniable facts.

It is less that Republicans are explicitly recruiting Latino statewide candidates, more that Republicans have simply proved willing to embrace talented, credentialed candidates who have appeal beyond their racial roots. In contrast, whatever their skill level, Democratic Latino or black politicians virtually always gain entree to politics through representing districts that are either ethnic or in a few cases, just monolithically liberal.

Predictably, the Democratic path yields minorities who are defined early as spokespersons for their own communities, and whose voting records are well to the left of center - a weak formula for statewide office even in blue states, a ludicrously weak one in red or border states. In the last 20 years, the rare Democratic minority breakthroughs at the gubernatorial or Senate level have been in states where Democrats had a massive edge in party ID (Massachusetts in 2006), Republicans fielded negligible opposition (Illinois in 2004) or in special cases like the "Year of the Woman" for Carol Mosely Braun in 1992 and Bob Menendez's emergence in a machine dominated Democratic environment like New Jersey, where Republicans have not won a Senate race since 1972.

What Democrats have done infrequently in 20 years - elect minorities to lead or represent their entire states - Republicans did four times in the 2010 cycle alone, and will do again with Cruz this November. Its a trend that the next generation of Latino, black, and Indian political talents can't help but see, and in the next ten years, it will redefine the racial contours of both conservatism and American politics.

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